CHAPTER 4

"Tricks, traps, ambushes and other efforts resulting in the surprise of one party by another have been commonplace in Chinese warfare from as far back as we have records…" –historian David A. Graff, associate professor at the Institute of Military History and 20th Century Studies at Kansas State University

The class sat in stunned silence, waiting for Lena to finish.

“What do you mean?” asked Bill.

Lena said, “The Chinese have a way to wipe out America’s satellites. It’s a new and very powerful cyber-weapon, developed in America. We don’t know how or when they got it, but our latest intelligence confirms that they are in possession and testing it out.”

The blood drained from David’s face as he realized why he was chosen to come to this island. “They have ARES?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Yes.” replied Lena.

Brooke asked, “What’s ARES?”

David said, “It’s a cyber-weapon, like she said. The place I work...we keep an eye out for different types of information technology that might be useful to our intelligence agencies. About a year ago, some students at MIT created a type of worm that could bypass all known security in several key communications channels. It was designed to work on data farms and the vast majority of military and communications satellites. When coupled with other programs that the Defense Department already had, the applications became devastatingly potent. It could potentially take satellites offline, hijack their signals, or even crash them into the earth’s atmosphere. In data-server farms, which much of the cloud-based world is now reliant upon, the theory is that it could cut power long enough for the servers to overheat and become seriously damaged. The MIT students had used a lot of the same code that the NSA’s STUXNET used to sabotage Iranian nuclear centrifuges a few years ago. But this worm was several orders of magnitude more advanced than that. What these kids came up with was unreal.”

“And the Chinese have this?” said Henry.

Lena nodded. “We believe so.”

Henry said, “Awesome. Glad my taxes are being put to good use. So, let’s say there are between 1500 and 2000 active satellites right now. Most are communications satellites. About a third are military satellites. Those numbers include foreign ones. There are another 2000-3000 inactive satellites just floating in orbit. I would think that the most efficient means of F-ing us over would be to program all of the active ones to crash.”

The classroom was quiet.

Bill said, “Can they really do that?”

Brooke said, “Well it wouldn’t be easy. There are a lot of protections. But ultimately it comes down to two things—do you have the hacking capability and the hardware capability? Russia and China would likely be the only nations that could do something like that. And they’d only be able to do it for a short period of time as far as I know. I’m probably not supposed to admit this, but China actually took control of two of our satellites back in 2008 - a Landsat 7 and a Terra AM-1. They had control for 12 minutes. People got fired. But it’s hard to do. It takes an incredible amount of energy to power the dish on the ground. Probably around 5 to 10 million watts.”